The Sea
excerpt from 1872-word short story
available for publication
The boy had no arms. He lived with his mother in a little house on a cliff, and his bedroom window looked over the sea, but he didn’t get to spend much time sighing bitter-sharp breaths of longing. The doctors said that the wet cold air was bad for his health, but the boy didn’t want to move away, so he mostly stayed with them in his little white hospital cot with the scratchy tan blanket and a pot of drooping daisies on the table by his bed. When he wasn’t coughing and sniffling and shivering with fever, he was allowed to go home, back to seashell décor and pale wood floors and a bedroom with a big open window letting in the salt and fish smell of the ocean.
He would sit in his low chair with the tall sides and stare out that window all day, and sometimes all night. He would watch the waves foaming white at their crests and falling down to slap against the dark brown of the cliff far below. When the wind was blowing hard, sometimes the spray would leap up and mist across his face, and he would close his eyes and let himself be reborn. He watched the ships way out over the water and wondered where they were going and why, what and who they carried, and if anyone on that ship knew someone who he might know. He looked up at the sky, gray and swirling or vast and flat and blue, and he would imagine skimming over the clouds and dipping down into the water, dancing in the air to music only he could hear, and when he finally shifted from his chair to his bed and tucked his feet under the folded blanket at the end, the mournful two-tone cries of the seabirds followed him into his dreams.
Sometimes, the boy’s mother took him away from his window. She brought him downstairs, into the kitchen or the living room, and showed him videos of other people without arms, people who did amazing things that the boy knew he would never match. She convinced him to try playing sports, soccer and running, but he didn’t like those games and went back to his window as soon as she let him. She taught him about the world, about mathematics and history and science, but the boy’s favorite was when she would read to him, stories about people far away and long ago, because they carried him to other places and it was almost as good as looking out his window.
The boy didn’t cry when he had to go to the hospital, anymore. When he was very young and he woke gasping for air that hurt to breathe and stifling under a heavy blanket of fever, he used to sob and whisper-scream until his mother finally heard him and bundled him away, and then he would cry every night in the hospital because he had to stay alone and it was dark and quiet and smelled like nothing and he missed the salt and rush of the sea. As he grew older the boy’s sobs turned to hitching breaths that made him dizzy but didn’t hurt so much, so he stopped crying and lay in pale silence instead, curling his toes into his sheets until dawn brought color back into the world. His mother still soothed him with a palm on his forehead and whispers that he was special, that he’d been born so early because he knew how loved he was and because the angels knew that the world needed him to be a better place, that he made her life so much brighter, that he just had to breathe through it and he would feel better soon. Even after he gave up crying, she murmured nightly promises that she would find him a pair of wings and let him fly.